IPR Succes Stories: “When, What and How?”↗️

WHEN? IPR insights from sessions

During the sessions we noticed that participants were obviously focused on their main activity, which also meant that not all have proper strategies or even plans for their IPR.

This is why we presented IPR strategy as a business-enhancing and otherwise beneficial life cycle, in order to visualize the relevance of a strategy:

• Birth: who will be registered as IP owner? What about partners and/or stakeholders: who has which rights, in what context and under what conditions?
• Growing up (development) IP should grow along: monitoring (contractual) transfer of IP rights by your developers, avoid dependency on third parties, license agreements, freedom to operate: freedom to test, market, sell in the area of choice without getting into infringement or other conflicts.
• Adulthood: avoid vulnerabilities for your operations, not just infringement of IP but also e.g. (vendor) lock-ins. Consider if IPR should at some point be separated from the business activities. Smart IPR strategies: other purposes, licensing, selling on: who would be interested?
• Continuous development adds to the value of the IPR in multiple ways: instant value, widen range of customers and investors, marketing, staying ahead of competition.
• End of life cycle: selling the business, splitting up, terminating activities: how to take good care of what you have been working for all this time!

WHAT? IPR insights from sessions

During the sessions we noticed that many of the participants were not sufficiently aware what IPR actually contains, how it is properly established, and what it means for the enterprise and its future.

Therefore, we discussed the different types of IPR and the ways it can be established:

• Different types of IPR, different ways of establishing: trade name, domain name, brand, logo, designs, slogans, copyright, patents: all representing value and contributing to a professional business image.
• Mainly patents are yet very expensive to establish, but they can on the other hand also be very worthwhile. Other registrations are relatively less expensive, and some are even very easy and cheap to establish, such as trade names or domain names.
• The absence of a one-stop European system for IPR makes it much more expensive if a sufficient level of protection is sought after in more European countries, which is often the case. This is something that would enhance European trade and the European economy tremendously and would enhance businesses to also compete outside the EU.
• Any business plan should include a full analysis and strategies for all applicable types of IPR. IPR management is insufficient, it should also include IPR strategies on how to create value and how to market IPR.
• Many of the participants have developed IPR protectable software, and collect different types of data, retrieved from different sources. Software is protected by copyright basically if original, shows the personal creativity of its maker, and if it is visible. Mere technical features and functionalities are not protected.
• Many questions of the participants related to the use and protection of data. Data is also not IPR protected but could nevertheless be protected in different ways for similar reasons as IPR. As for IPR, a professional business plan should include a data management but also a data strategy system.

HOW? IPR insights from sessions

We noticed that some of the participants were hesitant as the costs and did not see IPR as an important asset to invest in. Often they had not yet looked into how much costs or effort was actually involved per type of IPR. We also noticed that the names of some of the projects were not very distinctive, which could be a problem for establishing IPR.

We discussed the actions that are relevant to undertake:

• Prepare an IPR-analysis of any and all of the potential IPR related to the enterprise
• Make a plan for the necessary steps to be taken, not just for protection but also for exploitation, all of this short, mid and long term, for scaling up purposes.
• Include in the plan possible future developments such as cross border activities
• Steps in this plan may include different types of registrations (patents, designs, logo’s, trademarks, trade names, etc.), but also non-disclosure agreements, licensing agreements, IPR clauses in employment or other agreements, non-competition clauses or agreements, and also agreements on internal co-operation such as shareholder agreements, joint venture agreements, etc.
• Also include in the plan a strategy for data, including a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) if personal or retrievable data are involved.

Author: Arthur’s Legal, Strategies & Systems